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Reviewed by:
  • Ernst Lothar: Schriftsteller, Kritiker, Theaterschaffender by Dagmar Heissler
  • Joseph McVeigh
Dagmar Heissler, Ernst Lothar: Schriftsteller, Kritiker, Theaterschaffender. Literaturgeschichte in Studien und Quellen 25. Vienna: Böhlau, 2016. 480 pp.

Despite being the author of sixteen novels and assorted short prose pieces and having a prolific career as theatrical director and critic both before and after World War II, Ernst Lothar (1890–1874, born Lothar Ernst Müller) has been notably missing from the Austrian cultural canon of the twentieth century. Although Kurt Pinthus once called him “the most successful living Austrian writer” in the 1940s, Lothar viewed himself as simply “ein Mitteltalent mit guten Absichten” whose first love was the theater. Perhaps his support of the Ständestaat under Dollfuss and Schuschnigg in the 1930s played a role in his lack of major success as a writer in Austria after 1945. Or perhaps his return to Austria in 1945 as a cultural officer with the US Army whose job it was to promote American culture in the American zone of occupation alienated the cultural establishment that complained of cultural Überfremdung in those years. However, that it took almost half a century after his death for the first comprehensive biography to appear may be attributable more to the wide dispersion and gaps of his Nachlass, which contains next to nothing from the period before 1939. Heissler also reports that he kept few copies of letters to or from famous contemporaries. Those he did keep were reportedly destroyed by his second wife after his death. His own autobiography, Das Wunder des Überlebens (1960), has a number of blank spaces as well. Despite such challenges the author has done a superb job of bringing together and critically assessing those materials that still exist. The resulting picture of Ernst Lothar is one of a survivor whose path through two world wars and their tumultuous aftermaths is well worth studying.

Although Ernst Lothar had established himself before World War II as a theater critic and director—he succeeded Otto Preminger as director of the Theater in der Josefstadt from 1935 to 1938 and worked with Max Reinhardt at the Salzburger Festspiele—his writings in the United States (1940–1945) had perhaps the greatest impact of any of his works. His four novels, A Woman is Witness (1941), Beneath Another Sun (1943, with over 640,000 copies sold in the US), The Angel with the Trumpet (1944, with over 300,000 copies sold), and The Prisoner (1945) had been first written in German, then translated and published in English, attracting a large reading public in the US. In contrast to many émigré writers of those years who had no success finding a writing career [End Page 171] abroad, the groundwork for Lothar’s success in the US was laid in the early 1930s when his novel Der Hellseher (1931) was published in English translation in the US. The book was reviewed by the New York Times, whose critic saw in the novel a “modern Teutonic school of novel writing” characterized by a “clouded realism” and distributed by the Book League of America. It was made into a Hollywood film a short time later (The Clairvoyant, 1935) starring Claude Rains and Fay Wray, the latter of whom had attained fame in King Kong two years earlier. A second novel from the 1930s, Die Mühle der Gerechtigkeit oder Das Recht auf den Tod (1933), was similarly picked up by Hollywood and made into the feature film An Act of Murder (1948) with Fredric March. Thus, by the time Lothar arrived in the US in 1940 he was already known as a writer. His contibutions to the exile press in the US, primarily the Austro-American Tribune and Aufb au, were also widely read and tended to emphasize the differences between Germans and Austrians. Yet despite his high visibility as a bestselling author, Lothar shied away from overtly political activity while in the US and refused membership in various exile organizations, such as Austrian Action and the Austro-American League, who nevertheless often used his name without permission. Although Heissler does not go into the long-term impact of Lothar’s writings in the US, their...

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